The headline is enticing: “When will Harriet Tubman adorn the $20 bill.”
When indeed? It’s been a little over four months since President Joe Biden took office and soaked up praise in his early days for pledging to look for ways to “speed up” the process of putting abolitionist, Civil War spy Underground Railroad conductor and hero Tubman on the front of the $20 bill, replacing Tennessean and President Andrew Jackson, who owned enslaved people and forcibly relocated Native Americans.
“But,” the Washington Post story notes, “there is little evidence that the administration has taken any steps to accelerate the schedule set out years ago by a small agency within the Treasury Department. Despite the growing national push to honor the contributions of women and people of color – and Biden’s personal promise to do so – Tubman is still not set to appear on the $20 by the end of Biden’s first term, or even a hypothetical second term. If the current timeline holds, it will have taken a full 16 years to realize the suggestion of a 9-year-old girl whose 2014 letter to then-President Barack Obama publicly launched the process.”
Treasury officials say changing the portrait on the $20 is not as simple as it sounds, largely because of the need for sophisticated anti-counterfeiting features.
Cry us a river. It will take 16 years to do that? Three presidential terms or more?